Improving your online profit is the primary goal of all businesses both large and small. Unfortunately, this can prove to be a challenge for many entrepreneurs.
It takes a good marketing strategy, a great, well-designed website and a couple of other things which are all key in increasing the sales for your online store.
A good e-commerce page speeds and performance is crucial in attracting and keeping online visitors to your site. Any delays will translate to a loss of potential customers to a faster and efficient competitor.
This time delay hugely affects your e-commerce sales and it has been proven that a two-second speed delay translates to a decrease in conversions by over 66%.
The experts in search engine optimization will advise you that slow pages affect ranking both in paid and organic searches. In fact, Google made it official in their Speed Update that from July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
In this post, we will be discussing tips to improve website speed. This will not only improve your site’s traffic, but also it will improve your online store conversion rate.
1. Improve Your Online Store Conversion Rate: Use a fast and efficient hosting site
The page speed may vary depending on the end-users device but the hosting infrastructure plays a large part in enabling your website’s performance especially during critical times of high traffic or transaction days.
Many sites that do not have a reliable hosting site experience crashing during these peak hours or days. This results in a big loss and puts a dent on the reputation of your site.
When hosting your e-commerce site, always make sure to confirm the memory limits for the purpose of upgrading during peak hours, days or seasons.
Also, it is good to have a projection of your peak user load so as to avoid crashes by a sudden surge in transactions. It’s always advisable to prepare in advance for unexpected traffic spikes or increase in orders so that you can cushion your site adequately.
2. Use of Pop-ups
Pop-ups are a great way to market your products on your site. They save the customers time by quickly displaying the items hence making their decision fast whether they are interested or not without the need of visiting the products detail page. However, these pop-ups must be used sparingly as they might slow down your page loading speed.
3. Using a Unique Domain Name
The domain name for your e-commerce site must relate to the products been offered. The shorter the domain name, the easier it is for your customers to recall and even recommend it to their friends.
Make sure when coming with the name, it has to be memorable and unique too. For example, if you are selling books, make sure that the name you choose contains the product you are selling such as www.goodbooks.com.
4. Use Relevant Keywords
To increase your sales for your online store, you must use highly impressive and relevant keywords in your website content. The headings, body, products and meta description should all highlight the keywords.
By having relevant keywords, your site attracts potential customers and also increases the opportunity of attracting a high number of online visitors. You can get the details on high impression keywords on Google Keyword Planner Tool.
However, bear in mind not to overstuff the keywords on your site’s content as this will get you penalized by Google. It is advised to maintain the density of the keyword at most 1% on a single page.
5. Quality Images
A good, high quality, well thought out image helps draws your targeted customer attention more quickly than a thousand words. This can be backed up scientifically because the brain processes visual images more than 60,000 times faster than a text.
Shoppers tend to be highly influenced and prefer buying products which are well displayed on the front page of a website. Displaying your most popular product on the front page will increase your online store performance.
However, some styles of displaying can lead to information being pulled from your product page as thumbnails. This problem may occur when the image is pulled in a larger size than needed.
The result is the users’ browser to scale it down for the thumbnail, therefore impacting negatively on your page load speed and you can also use OCR library for C# to read text from images of your products.
To ensure you download a small image while maintaining the quality, you can use an application that has an inbuilt image size parameters. This will optimize image sizes and ensure a quality product image is clearly displayed on the sites.
6. Compress Image Size and Numbers
As much as images are vital in attracting customers to your e-commerce site, they account for almost half of the weight of the page! In fact, the best images, in terms of quality, the heavier it becomes. Fortunately, it is possible to reduce the size of the image without compromising on its quality with lossless compression.
7. Using Mobile Platform Effectively
Simply operating a website is not enough. You have to acknowledge the fact that mobile phones are more accessible to more people than laptops or desktops. Today’s reality is that many shoppers use Phones and Tablets for shopping than any other media.
Here, the key is to optimize the use of mobile phones, especially for today’s Millenials. If your e-commerce site is not mobile-friendly, then be sure that you are losing so much to those sites that are mobile phone compatible. Building a mobile app should be a top priority.
Takeaway
If you start recording a decline in sales, you should device creative and appealing ways not only for marketing your products but also your e-commerce site.
Make sure your website is authentic and feels trustworthy so that your customers will feel secure and comfortable to fill their financial details for payments.
Capitalize on customer’s feedback and testimonials, and make use of promotions and discounts. This will create a social buzz that will pull traffic to your site and increase your online store conversion rate. 🙂
